Mark Dowie
English 281 C
Andy Meyer
1 August 2011
Human Nature
One way to guarantee a conversation without a conclusion is to ask a group of people what
nature is.
—Rebecca Solnit, University of California
In the course of “preserving the commons for all of the people,” a frequently stated
mission of national parks and protected areas, one class or culture of people, one philosophy of
nature, one worldview, and one creation myth has almost always been preferred over all others.
These favored ideas and impressions are at some point expressed in art. And it is through art that
our earliest preconceptions and fantasies about nature are formed.
The mystique of Yosemite, for example, was largely created by photographers like
Charles Leander Weed, Carleton Watkins, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston, all of whose
magnificent images of the place are completely bereft of humanity or any sign of it having been
there. Here, they said (and they all knew better) is an untrammeled landscape, virgin and pristine,
not a bootprint to be seen, not a hogan or teepee in sight.
Here in this wild place one may seek and find complete peace. They and their friends
who sought to preserve an idealized version of nature called it “wilderness,” a place that humans
had explored but never altered, exalted but never touched. It was the beginning of a myth, a
fiction that would gradually spread around the world, and for a century or more drive the
conservation agenda of mankind.
They all knew better, the portrayers of wilderness; in fact, Adams assiduously avoided
photographing any of the local Miwok who were rarely out of his sight as he worked Yosemite
Valley. He filled thousands of human-free negatives with land he knew the Miwok had tended
for at least four thousand years. And he knew that the Miwok had been forcibly evicted from
Yosemite Valley, as other natives would later be from national parks yet to be created, all in the
putative interest of protecting nature from human disturbance.
One can be fairly certain that Weed, Watkins, Adams, and Weston had all at one time in their
lives read George Perkins Marsh‟s 1864 classic Man and Nature and recalled Marsh arguing
passionately for the preservation of wild virgin nature, which he said was justified as much for
artistic reasons as for any other. Marsh also believed that the destruction of the natural world
threatened the very existence of humanity. We know that naturalist John Muir read Marsh and so
did Teddy Roosevelt. They both say so in their journals and memoirs. So when the topic of a
park in Yosemite came up, Muir and Roosevelt were, so to speak, on the same page.
Dueling Sciences
Natural science is just one way of understanding nature.
—Bill Adams, Cambridge University
The Yosemite model of conservation, which still expresses itself in a fairly consistent
form, has sparked a worldwide conflict between two powerful scientific disciplines:
anthropology and conservation biology.
These two august sciences remain at odds with one another over how best to conserve
and protect biological and cultural diversity, and perhaps more perplexing, how best to define
two of the most semantically tortured terms in both their fields—nature and wilderness.
Cultural anthropologists spend years living in what many of us would call “the wild,” studying
the languages, mores, and traditions of what many of us would call “primitive peoples.”
Eventually the anthropologists come to understand the complex native cultures that keep remote
communities thriving without importing much from outside their immediate homeland.
“We do not ask if indigenous peoples are allies of conservation or what sort of nature they
protect,” write Paige West and Dan Brockington, two anthropologists who have spent most of
their careers researching the impact of protected areas on indigenous cultures; “instead we draw
attention to the ways in which protected areas become instrumental in shaping battles over
identity, residence and resource use” (West and Brockington 1). Their experience has convinced
them that the best way to protect a thriving natural ecosystem is to leave those communities
pretty much alone, where and as they are, doing what they‟ve done so well for so many
generations—culturing a healthy landscape, or what development experts would call “living
sustainably.”
Wildlife biologists also spend much of their careers in remote natural settings, but tend to
prefer landscapes void of human hunters, gatherers, pastoral nomadics, or rotational farmers.
They find anthropologists somewhat “romantic” about indigenous cultures, particularly tribes
that have become partly assimilated and modernized; which generally means the tribes are in
possession of environmentally destructive technologies such as shotguns, chainsaws, and
motorized vehicles, conveniences that Western naturalists know from their own civilization‟s
experience can wreak havoc on healthy ecosystems.
These two disciplines are also at odds over what they mean by nature and the degree to
which humanity is part of it. And they have a different sense of wildness and wilderness. It is in
this regard that one is more likely to hear anthropologists calling naturalists “romantic.”
Listening to this exchange of insults one might conclude one is witnessing a clash of romantic
tendencies.
William Cronon, an environmental historian at the University of Wisconsin, has spent
much of his intellectual career grappling with these conflicts. His thinking on the subject
eventually came together in 1995 with publication of a widely read and controversial essay titled
“The Trouble with Wilderness, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.”
“The time has come to rethink wilderness,” Cronon begins his essay. He goes on to
challenge the widely held and decidedly romantic notion of environmentalists that “wilderness
stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully
infected the earth.” That concept, Cronon believes, gives credence to “the illusion that we can
somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed
before we began to leave our marks on the world.” That fiction, which Cronon believes is based
on a profound misunderstanding of nature, and our place in it, creates a force that is antagonistic
to conservation. “The myth of wilderness,” he writes, “is that we can somehow leave nature
untouched by our passage.” He goes on to challenge the shopworn and often misunderstood
shibboleth of Henry David Thoreau that “in wildness is the preservation of the world.”
Cronon concludes: “The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes
that wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being one place on earth that stands apart
from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular
human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where
the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little
while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it is a
product of that civilization.”
These are fighting words to a “civilization” that has set millions of square miles of
valuable land aside as “wilderness,” passed a national law—the 1964 Wilderness Act—to both
define and protect wilderness, and still supports a dozen or so well-heeled national organizations
to lobby for more wilderness set-asides and convince the public that figuratively walling off
large expanses of unoccupied land is the only way to preserve nature and biological diversity.
But how natural is wilderness? To Cronon, not as natural as it seems.
“Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because
it seems so natural,” he says. By glorifying pristine landscapes, which exist only in the
imagination of romantics, Western conservationists divert attention from the places where people
live and the choices they make every day that do true damage to the natural world of which they
are part.
So the removal of aboriginal human beings from their homeland to create a commodified
wilderness is a deliberate charade, a culturally constructed neo-Edenic narrative played out for
the enchantment of weary human urbanites yearning for the open frontier that their ancestors
“discovered,” then tamed, a place to absorb the sounds and images of virgin nature and forget for
a moment the thoroughly unnatural lives they lead.
So What is Wild?
What counts as wilderness is not determined by the absence of people, but by the relationship
between people and place.
—Jack Turner, philosopher
On several occasions during my research, an interview would be brought to a dead stop
after I included the word wild or wilderness in a question. The word simply didn‟t exist in the
dialect of the person I was interviewing. My interpreter would stare at me and wait for a better
question.
When I tried to explain what I meant by wild to Bertha Petiquan, an Ojibway woman in
northern Canada whose daughter was interpreting, she burst out laughing and said the only place
she had ever seen what she thought I was describing as wild was a street corner outside the bus
station in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
In Alaska, Patricia Cochran, a Yupik native scientist, told me “we have no word for
„wilderness.‟ What you call „wilderness‟ we call our back yard. To us none of Alaska is
wilderness as defined by the 1964 Wilderness Act—a place without people. We are deeply
insulted by that concept, as we are by the whole idea of „wilderness designation‟ that too often
excludes native Alaskans from ancestral lands.” Yupiks also have no word for biodiversity. Its
closest approximation means food. And the O‟odham (Pima) word for wilderness is
etymologically related to their terms for health, wholeness, and liveliness (Nabhan).
Jakob Malas, a Khomani hunter from a section of the Kalahari that is now Gemsbok
National Park, shares Cochran‟s perspective on wilderness. “The Kalahari is like a big
farmyard,” he says, “It is not wilderness to us. We know every plant, animal, and insect, and
know how to use them. No other people could ever know and love this farm like us.”
“I never thought of the Stein Valley as a wilderness,” remarks Ruby Dunstan, a
Nl‟aka‟pamux from Alberta. “My Dad used to say „That‟s our pantry.‟ Then some
environmentalists declared it a wilderness and said no one was allowed inside because it was so
fragile. So they put a fence around it, or maybe around themselves” (qtd. in World Rainforest
Movement 14).
The Tarahumara of Mexico also have no word or concept meaning wilderness. Land is
granted the same love and affection as family. Ethnoecologist Enrique Salmon, himself a
Tarahumara, calls it “kincentric ecology.” “We are immersed in an environment where we are at
equal standing with the rest of the world,” he says. “They are all kindred relations—the trees and
rocks and bugs and everything is in equal standing with the rest” (qtd. in Roach).
When wildness is conflated with wilderness, and wilderness with nature, and nature is
seen as something separate and uninfluenced by human activity, perhaps it‟s time to examine
real situations and test them against the semantics of modern conservation. Are Maasai cattle
part of nature? Perhaps not today, but when they wandered through the open range by the
thousands, tended by a few human herdsman whose primary interest was to keep the biota
healthy for their livestock and other wildlife, one might say they were “wild,” certainly as wild
as the springbok, eland, elephant, and buffalo that daily leave the open pasture to ravage Maasai
farms for fodder.
And Who Is Nature?
We forget the reciprocity between the wild in nature and the wild in us.
—Jack Turner, philosopher
In one of the many conversations about nature I have been part of over the past three
years, I said to a man—an educated, erudite, and generous supporter of international
conservation, whose view of nature differed considerably from my own—“You are nature.” He
looked at me and laughed nervously. I had not insulted him, he assured me. He just didn‟t
appreciate the notion that he was part or product of a system that also created “snails, kudzo,
mules, earthquakes, grizzly bears, viruses, wildfires, and poison oak.” It turned out also that his
younger sister had, years before, been badly mauled by a mountain lion.
Well, how do you convince someone with that experience that he is kin with the lion?
Perhaps you can‟t, I thought, but he seemed interested in continuing the conversation. Others
joined in, and by the end of the evening he had accepted himself as an equal in the same creation
with the lion that mauled his sister, a creation he was willing to call “nature,” a creation of which
he was not apart, but a part.
When one perceives humanity to be something separate from nature, it becomes easier to
regard landscapes in their “natural state” as landscapes without human inhabitants and aspire to
preserve wilderness by encouraging the existence and survival in landscape of as many species
as possible, minus one—humans.
The valuable contribution anthropology has made to conservation is perhaps best
expressed by Paige West and Dan Brockington, who advise conservationists to be more aware of
“local ways of seeing,” and that the practice of conservation will be more successful “if
practitioners learn local idioms for understanding people‟s surroundings before they begin to
think about things in terms of nature and culture.” There is a need, they say, for conservationists
“to grasp the complicated ways that people interact with what they rely on for food, shelter, as
well as spiritual, social and economic needs” (qtd. in Roach).
Enrique Salmon believes that “language and thought works together. So when a people‟s
language includes a word like „wilderness,‟ that shapes their thoughts about their relationship to
the natural world. The notion of wilderness then carries the notion that humans are bad for the
environment” (qtd. in World Rainforest Movement 14).
Certainly someone who regards the forest as his “pantry” is going to see the flora, fauna,
soil, and water in a somewhat different light than the tourist, biologist, miner, or logger. But is
there not something that can be seen by all of them, some common ground on which the forest‟s
intrinsic value can be considered and agreed upon?
One example of a very different local idiom that Western naturalists have difficulty
understanding is that of the Gimi, one of the hundreds of remote, Stone Age cultures in central
Papua New Guinea. The Gimi “have no notion of nature or culture,” say West and Brockington.
“They see themselves in an ongoing set of exchanges with their ancestors [who they believe are]
animating and residing in their forests, infusing animals, plants, rivers, and the land itself with
life. When people die their spirits go back to the forest and infuse themselves into plants, animals
and rivers. When the living use these natural resources they do not see it as a depletion but rather
as an ongoing exchange” of energy and spirit.
When the Gimi kill and eat an animal, “they understand it to be generated by their
ancestors‟ life forces and it will work to make their life force during this lifetime. When they die
that force will go back to the forest and replenish it” (World Rainforest Movement 14). This is an
admittedly difficult cosmology for the Western mind to contemplate or accept. But the fact that
every atom in every living thing has existed since the beginning of time gives some scientific
grounding to the Gimis‟ belief that spirit is simply reorganized force and matter. That said, their
understanding “of the relationship between humans and their surroundings [remains] extremely
difficult to reconcile with arguments about the decline and loss of biological diversity” (World
Rainforest Movement 14).
However, if Western conservationists in central Papua New Guinea know that the Gimi
believe all matter is here for eternity, that it simply changes form over time, they will be better
equipped to work with local communities in the preservation of biodiversity. But if they dismiss
that cosmology as primitive animism and seek to impose Western science and religion on the
Gimi people, their conservation initiative will almost certainly fail.
Of course, the final arbiters in this scientific conflict should be indigenous peoples themselves,
the very people that early advocates for Yellowstone Park said had no interest in raw nature or
the park area.
They were alleged to be afraid of the geysers and fumaroles. (Not true. They cooked over
them.) The truth is that much of what the rest of us know about nature and have incorporated into
the various sciences we use to protect it—ecology, zoology, botany, ethnobotany—we learned
from the very people we have expelled from the areas we have sought to protect.
Works Cited
Nabhan, Gary. Cultures of Habit. Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2997. Print.
Roach, John. “Indigenous Group Keeps Ecology All in the Family.” National Geographic (June
29, 2006). Print.
West, Paige and Dan Brockington. “An Anthropological Perspective on Some Unexpected
Consequences of Protected Areas.” Conservation Biology 20.3 (2006): 609-616. Print.
World Rainforest Movement and Oilwatch. Protected Areas: Protected Against Whom? Eds.
Elizabeth Bravo and Ricardo Carrere. Montevideo: World Rainforest Movement, 2004.
Print.